A Family Separated by Distance
Prison is difficult but when an inmate is far from home it is even more painful.
When Thomas, an inmate in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), sat in the visiting room of the medium security prison in rural Kentucky, he stared at his wife who had spent two days driving to the prison to visit him. Thomas had pleaded with prison staff months ago for a transfer closer to home. His children, ages eight and eleven, could not miss school and the drive would have meant not only missed school but missed sport practices on the weekend. The miles between Thomas and his family had a weight all their own, emotional, psychological, logistical. But for now, he remained thousands of miles away.
Thomas’s story is not unique. Across the federal prison system, many inmates harbor a hope to serve their time as close as possible to the people and communities they left behind. In principle, the BOP shares that goal, placing incarcerated individuals in facilities nearer their homes when safety, security, and resources allow. In fact, the First Step Act sets the standard to place inmates within 500 miles of their home. But as a recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit reveals, the pathway to fulfilling that mission is riddled with inconsistencies, institutional constraints, and conflicting priorities.
The Promise of Proximity
The OIG’s audit titled “Efforts to Place Inmates Close to Home” begins by laying out the intended promise that proximity of incarceration can help sustain family ties, support rehabilitation, and reduce the practical burdens on loved ones. This was recently noted by BOP Deputy Director Josh Smith as a priority for the BOP. But the report noted that the solution is not that easy. OIG acknowledges that the BOP must balance that ideal of closer placement to home with security, classification, capacity, and cost considerations. Over the course of the audit, the OIG examined a representative sample of placement decisions, reviewed policies, interviewed officials, and analyzed statistical data. The focus was on how the BOP actually decides where to place an inmate and how those decisions track with policy and practice. What emerges is a portrait of an agency trying but often stumbling to live up to its own principles.
A Gap Between Policy and Practice
One core tension revealed is the gap between what BOP policies call for and how those policies are implemented. On paper, the BOP considers multiple factors when deciding inmate placement, such as the inmate’s security classification, medical needs, program needs, institutional closeness, and bed space availability. But in practice, some of those factors appear to carry more weight than others, sometimes overwhelmingly so.
The OIG found cases in which inmates were assigned to facilities thousands of miles from their primary residence, even when beds were available closer. Some decisions were justified on operational grounds, like avoiding overpopulation in certain facilities, but the audit suggests that such justifications were not always grounded in consistent or documented reasoning. Even more troubling, the audit identifies instances where BOP officials did not fully document the decision making steps or the tradeoffs considered. This lack of documentation makes it difficult to verify whether a closer placement was rejected for valid reasons or for less defensible ones.
Miles That Divide Families
For many incarcerated persons, distance from home is more than a metric. It is a barrier to maintaining bonds and preparing for reentry. The audit highlights how far some placements stray, sending inmates from one region to another with little regard for family or community ties. That imposes high travel burdens on family members in both cost and time and creates practical obstacles for regular visitation, which social science often ties to better outcomes. This issue was addressed by Deputy Director Smith in a recent video. Some inmates were placed more than a thousand miles from their homes, across states and time zones. For families already stretched thin financially, those placements often render face to face visits impossible. The psychological toll can be severe, with children growing detached, partners feeling abandoned, and the incarcerated becoming more isolated.
Operational Realities and Constraints
It is not always that distance is deliberately chosen. Sometimes it is the residual effect of systemic constraints like bed shortages, overcrowding, or classification mismatches. Not every prison can host every security level or programming need. Even if a facility is close to an inmate’s home, it may lack the appropriate capacity. Moreover, transporting inmates has costs. Changing assignments can disrupt populations in prisons already operating near capacity. Staff, support services, and budget allocations all play into operational realities.
BOP officials interviewed during the audit frequently cited these constraints. Yet the OIG also notes that some of these constraints are manageable if the agency is diligent and deliberate. The BOP could improve forecasting of bed needs, better coordinate across regions, or more transparently document exceptions to policy. The audit suggests that many of the constraints cited as immutable obstacles are sometimes treated as default answers.
Uneven Outcomes and Inequities
That creates patterns of unevenness and inequity. An especially disquieting theme is that placement gaps do not fall evenly. Inmates with stronger advocacy support, legal representation, or familiarity with internal processes are better positioned to push for favorable transfers. Those without such advantages are more likely to languish far from their home communities.
The OIG observed that BOP regions operate semi independently. What may be feasible in one region is not in another. Some regions appear more flexible or responsive to relocation requests, while others place heavier constraints. The resulting patchwork undermines equity, because two inmates with similar profiles might see sharply different outcomes depending solely on their region. This inconsistency corrodes confidence. If the system is uneven, inmates and family members see it less as institutional policy and more as a matter of luck or geography.
The Human Cost of Distance
The consequences of these decisions ripple beyond the walls. Consider Maria, whose husband was incarcerated in a distant state. Maria saved for months to afford one round trip visit. Their children asked fewer questions because they could not understand why their father never showed up at a recital or birthday party. The emotional distance grew as the miles lapped at their connection. When he eventually qualified for reentry programs, returning home was no longer just a matter of prison placement. It was now a battle to reweave frayed connections with few resources or time.
Charting a Path Forward
The audit offers a series of recommendations to address gaps between ideal and reality. It calls for stronger documentation so that placement decisions include robust explanations of the tradeoffs considered, better tracking of outcomes so that distance and recidivism rates can be studied, improved coordination across regions to reduce bottlenecks, periodic review of exceptions to prevent them from becoming the norm, and equitable access to relocation processes so that inmates without advocates are not disadvantaged. In its responses, the BOP acknowledged the findings and expressed willingness to cooperate, but the true test will be in whether these recommendations are fully implemented.
A Small Victory
In prison correspondence, Thomas continued to press his placement request. His case manager listed his security profile, program eligibility, and bed availability. When the BOP responded with a denial, they cited no matching facility within the region and classification mismatch, but did not fully explain why another closer prison had been rejected. Thomas appealed. After months, he was finally transferred to a prison about four hundred miles closer. It was not home, but it was progress.
The BOP could also use community placement to put inmates closer to home. Residential Reentry Centers (RRC) are more numerous than prisons and often located close to an inmate’s home, certainly under 100 miles. However, capacity issues at RRCs have plagued the BOP in fully implementing the First Step Act and the Second Chance Act, both of which were pushes by Congress to reduce prison populations and put inmates back into the community sooner.
Small victories like that may seem modest in the context of a complex federal prison system. Still, they matter to the people inside and to the ideals of fairness, rehabilitation, and human dignity. The OIG report makes clear that while proximity cannot always be guaranteed, it must be pursued with consistency, transparency, and care. The stakes are measured not just in miles but in the fragile threads of connection between inmates and the lives waiting for them beyond the walls.